NEW YORK GALLERIST Marian Goodman is one of the most powerful art dealers in the world, and also perhaps the most enigmatic. On a glorious summer day in London, her inscrutability is on full display as she stands amid a noisy Soho construction site, casting a careful eye over the Victorian warehouse that will soon contain her third gallery.

At 86, Goodman has been involved in the art business for nearly half a century. Yet she possesses few of the hallmarks that signify great dealers today—multiple outposts, such as Larry Gagosian, with 15 galleries in seven countries; palatial, starchitect-designed spaces like the ones David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth operate in New York's Chelsea neighborhood; or entire departments dedicated to making money by peddling secondary market, or resale, work. Instead, Goodman is renowned for her artists, who span multiple continents and eras, among them conceptual icons John Baldessari, Dan Graham and Lawrence Weiner; photographers Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra and Thomas Struth; installation artists such as Annette Messager and Danh Vō; and painters Julie Mehretu and Gerhard Richter, possibly her most illustrious talent.

In many ways, Goodman made her name by bucking trends—opting for anti-market conceptualism when market-friendly Neo-Expressionist paintings were the rage, and refusing to relocate from uptown to SoHo or Chelsea when everyone else was doing it. But with her London gallery, designed by the in-demand London-based architect David Adjaye and set just off Golden Square, Goodman seems to be falling in line with the other New York lodestars who also have branches there, including Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and Gagosian. As with most of her decisions, her reasons for doing so are not immediately apparent.

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A rendering of the upper floor of Goodman's new London gallery
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Adjaye Associates

Weeks of cleaning have transformed the building's formerly grim facade into a glowing expanse of sandstone-colored brick. Sunlight streams through its newly refurbished windows and skylights, lighting up the cast-iron columns, the sinuously curving staircase and the vaulted ceiling of the upper floor. But as Goodman, wearing a cream Chanel-style jacket, surveys her new 11,000-square-foot domain, she concedes few clues about her impressions.

At first she mostly frets over details others have missed, such as the prominence of a ledge beneath the windows or a sign of moisture on a northern wall. Andrew Leslie Heyward, who directs Goodman's small Paris gallery and will run this one, too, walks alongside her, taking note. "So is it what you expected?" he asks. Poker-faced, Goodman responds, "I didn't know what I expected."

It's only when Leslie Heyward talks about art that Goodman softens. He points through a corner window to the park outside, where a sculpture by South Africa's William Kentridge, a longtime gallery artist, will be installed, and her face brightens. He explains that art movers will be able to drive a forklift straight through the front doors. "Enough room to lift a Jeff Wall in a crate 15 feet in the air!" Goodman says, relishing the possibilities for the Canadian photographer, whose work must be hoisted by crane into the windows of her fourth-floor gallery in New York.

Finally, passing by a generously windowed room on the upper floor, Goodman remarks that "Gerhard likes a lot of space," referring to the German painter Richter, whose show of new and recent work will inaugurate the gallery when it opens on October 14. (She consulted Richter, and many of her other artists, throughout the gallery's planning and design.)

By the time Leslie Heyward finally blurts out, "It looks so great," Goodman is smiling broadly. And even though the space is already drenched with light, the power of Goodman's approval is so strong that it's as though a second sun is shining.

Two days earlier, Goodman and I were talking over coffee in an empty dining room at her hotel in Basel, Switzerland. It was the day after Art Basel's VIP opening (Goodman has participated in the fair since 1970, its first year), and I asked her how she transformed herself into an art-world powerhouse. After all, she entered adulthood as a housewife—albeit a well-educated, progressive one—and now she stands at No. 14, and fourth among dealers, on ArtReview's "Power 100" list. Goodman gazed at me awkwardly then ducked her head and said, "I don't know."

For the nearly 50 years she's been in the business, Goodman has been renowned for her counterintuitive shyness, seriousness and reserve. In an article for the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl once reported an acquaintance describing her as someone "who backs away while saying 'hello.' " She's about the last person you'd expect to become a dealer, a profession normally associated with glad-handing salesmanship.

Yet by now, Goodman's standing is such that even her competitors sing her praises. "What's so extraordinary about Marian is, number one, the sure head with which she picks great artists," says dealer David Zwirner, "and again and again in different decades. And number two, the loyalty she has brought to those careers" by making sure "the artist is noticed through institutions and letting the market follow." When he opened his first gallery in New York in 1993, Zwirner adds, Goodman's was "a model that I aspired to."

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Lawrence Weiner's 'Scattered Matter Brought to a Known Density, With the Weight of the World, Cusped,' 2007
Courtesy of Marian Goodman gallery, New York/Paris

"If you'd only bought work from Marian Goodman over the last 40 years," says Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, "you would have one of the best museums in the world today. I don't know if there's any other gallerist you could say that of. Every one is a winner."

At a time when the role of museums is changing drastically, from scholarly repository to social-gathering spot, Goodman still regards public institutions as the most important home for her artists' work. (During the fair, her artists aren't on view only in her booth, but in exhibitions all over town.) Goodman's annual Basel dinner, held this year in a 14th-century castle just outside the city, is thick with directors and curators, including Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Sir Nicholas Serota, who runs Britain's Tate museums. Because of Goodman's pint-size stature—she's barely five feet tall—all must stoop to talk, and throughout the evening she is often referred to, only half-jokingly, as "the queen." With her blend of grandmotherliness—she often arrives at meetings bearing cake and beams indulgently when a toddler crosses her path—and imposing authority, the comparison is not far off.

Yet because Goodman and her employees routinely refuse to discuss sales, the gallery is hardly mentioned in press about the fair. (The hot Art Basel news was the sale of a 1986 Andy Warhol self-portrait for more than $30 million by Skarstedt, another New York gallery with a London branch.) Goodman herself is also notoriously chary of interviews, rarely agreeing to them and often regretting her cooperation. "Everyone at the gallery, including Marian, tries to tone it down," explains Roger Tatley, who was recently hired as a director for Goodman's London branch. "Artists should get the press."

GOODMAN DIDN'T open her first full-fledged gallery until 1977, less than a year before she turned 50, though her engagement with art began much earlier. Raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and educated at the Little Red School House, one of the city's first progressive schools, she grew up visiting galleries with her father, Maurice P. Geller, a first-generation Hungarian-American accountant who avidly collected the work of the mid-century American modernist Milton Avery. "When my father first started collecting, I thought he was mad," Goodman says. "But I came to really appreciate his passion."

Married at 20 ("or 21," Goodman says, "I can't remember anymore") to civil engineer William Goodman, she organized her first show in about 1962, as part of a PTA fundraising drive for the Walden School, where her two young children were students. (Michael is now a heavy-construction photographer based in Los Angeles, and Amy is an herbalist in Vermont. "She's a very green girl," Goodman says proudly.) The show included work by Avery, as well as Stuart Davis and Franz Kline, and Goodman later published a portfolio of related prints. "I found that I just loved it, and that was that," says Goodman, who has lived since the early '70s in a Central Park West penthouse, not far from where she grew up. The minimalist, art-filled aerie can be accessed only by taking the elevator to the building's top floor, and then climbing a back staircase that doubles as a fire exit.

Goodman entered Columbia University as a graduate student to study art history, focusing primarily on African and pre-Columbian cultures—an education that later helped her "shape my attitude about taking a more long-term view," she says. She dreamed of working in a museum, but "it wasn't an easy time for women to become curators in New York." So in 1965, she joined forces with friends and founded Multiples (later incorporated as Multiples, Inc.), a publishing company that produced editioned prints and objects, otherwise known as "multiples." Pop Art was on the rise, and a handful of progressive publishers in America and Europe were similarly aflame with the idea of bringing art to the masses. After trying unsuccessfully to persuade the Museum of Modern Art to run a similar program, Goodman had decided to do it herself, starting a pattern that would define her career. "It was the '60s," she says. "There was a strong urge to do the right thing."

Although she had no business experience—or her own checkbook, either, until her divorce in 1968—Goodman soon became a preeminent editions publisher, working with Americans such as Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers. In 1970, the year Multiples exhibited for the first time at Art Basel, Goodman published Artists and Photographs, a 19-piece portfolio that's now seen as seminal. Based on a show of the same name, it explored the way artists such as Ed Ruscha, Christo and Bruce Nauman were incorporating photography into their work.

Yet Goodman had sensed even broader vistas in 1968, when she visited West Germany for the first time to see the art exposition Documenta. "I realized there was a fully formed art world in Europe with major artists we didn't know much about," Goodman says. "It changed everything for me."

On that trip, she discovered Joseph Beuys, the shamanistic godfather of conceptual art, with whom she published several multiples. On another, she became enchanted by Marcel Broodthaers, a Belgian surrealist poet-turned-artist whose installations often critiqued museum displays. Her efforts to find him a New York gallery led to "a strikeout," Goodman says. So she did "the most irrational thing in my professional life for sure." In 1977, a year after Broodthaers's death, she opened the Marian Goodman Gallery with a show of his work. She was bent on exhibiting Europeans who might otherwise not be seen in New York.

At first Goodman, who supported the business with sales of editions, found it hard going. But "Marian was remarkably farsighted," says Serota, "in choosing to work with artists who would have the potential for a long career, to evolve and develop. And then she stuck with them." By 1985, the year after she moved into the building on West 57th Street that still houses her gallery, her program was strongly focused around post-minimalist, conceptual work, with Italian Arte Povera sculptors such as Giuseppe Penone and Giulio Paolini, and a lot of young Germans, including the installation artist Lothar Baumgarten, a former student of Beuys, and the then little-known painters Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter.

‘"Once she's made a commitment, that's it. She supports you 110 percent. Without her, I wouldn't have a film life." ’

——Steve McQueen

"If I had to say I have one gift," Goodman admits over tea in London, "it would be choosing well."

Goodman often talks about the struggles she encountered building a business as a woman in a man's world, and she didn't find much inspiration in the notable female dealers who had come before, like Martha Jackson and Betty Parsons, or even her relative contemporary Ileana Sonnabend. Instead, her model was Sonnabend's ex, Leo Castelli. "He was a very elegant man, and he conducted himself that way, too," Goodman says. "I learned about standards from him. I liked his kindness." (Indeed, Goodman is also known for being straightforward in her business dealings.)

During the 1980s market boom, when New York went crazy for Neo-Expressionist painting, Goodman set her sights on cooler, more conceptual work—preferring the multifaceted abstraction of Richter, for instance, whom she describes as "a modern man." When other dealers moved downtown, she stood fast on 57th Street. "I was watching people in SoHo proceed with great confidence and then choose the wrong artists," Goodman says. They would fight "over who was the best new find, and the winner would get the show. Then the next year, there was a new group and they'd start all over again. I didn't like it, I didn't respect it and I was always worried that it could be contagious."

In the late 1980s, she challenged herself by expanding her program. "There were new artists coming on the horizon, and I was terrified of making a choice. I finally said to myself, 'You have to do it.' Much to my amazement, I was lucky again"—this time with two new Germans, Struth and his Kunstakademie Düsseldorf classmate, the sculptor Thomas Schütte. Her winning streak continued even through the art market crash, with Gabriel Orozco, then a relative unknown from Mexico, and Kentridge, who focused on film made from drawings. Goodman soon realized that "for me, many of the best artists of the '90s generation were filmmakers"—a decision that led her to Pierre Huyghe and, more recently, Anri Sala and Yang Fudong.

Goodman also represents the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose 12 Years a Slave took the 2014 Oscar for best picture. "Without her, I wouldn't have a film life," McQueen says. He likens his early encounters with Goodman—when she visited his shows and watched his work develop for more than a year—to a courtship. "I think her work is done right at the beginning," he says. "It's to choose the artists she really wants to work with, and she takes it very, very seriously. Once she's made a commitment, that's it. She supports you 110 percent."

Her management style, at least where artists are concerned, is surprisingly laissez faire. She doesn't micromanage or pressure them to contribute work to fairs. She speaks to them regularly by phone and spends much of her time on the road attending shows, making studio visits and just generally catching up. Weiner calls her "a family friend" and "part of one's existence." Wall, who has shown with her since 1989, says, "We're married. She's had about 20 other marriages, too."

THE ARTISTS Goodman chooses are often viewed as subtly political, such as Mehretu, whose abstractions are inspired by current events. But Goodman doesn't see it quite that way. "The humanity in the work is what's important to me," she says. "It's art about life. And people need to be connected with something larger than themselves." Still, her beliefs are obvious: Given half a chance, she'll segue into a discussion of America's financial and educational inequalities, and the excellence of France's public health-care system. (Providing health care is "good business in the end," she says.) In 1956, Goodman was one of a group of civically engaged mothers who successfully battled Robert Moses when he tried to expand the parking lot at Tavern on the Green, forcing him to build a playground instead.

"I think she sees her gallery as a gesture about what American culture needs to be," Wall says. "How do you keep a serious notion of culture alive in an era where there are huge forces moving in the opposite direction? That has a lot to do with the choices she makes."

Goodman's choices are also motivated by concerns for her artists' historical legacy. When the collector Mitchell P. Rales approached Goodman in the early 2000s, hoping to acquire a Baldessari, she wouldn't consider it until he'd agreed to buy six of the artist's works for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., where the billionaire industrialist is a former board member, in addition to the six he purchased for Glenstone, his own private museum in Potomac, Maryland. "I had to convince Marian that we were worthy," Rales says, "so that she understood that this just wasn't somebody making a bet on whether John Baldessari's value would go up."

"That sounds like Marian," Baldessari says when he hears this story. "She's very careful about who gets work." But with Goodman, he adds, "artists come first. If she's being assertive, she's doing it for the artist."

That's partly why Goodman's artists are so loyal, remaining with her for decades. With his skyrocketing resale market, Richter, 82, is perhaps her most hotly courted talent. (With a record of $37.1 million, he's currently the second-most expensive living artist at auction, just behind Jeff Koons.) Richter says he'd never consider going elsewhere. "In German, we say sympathisch," he says of their first meeting, speaking in heavily accented English. "She was in her way of thinking close to me. I liked everything. For me she was wise, more than clever." Although he is approached frequently, primarily by "this famous Gagosian, who showed me their interest many times," Richter says, chuckling, "there is no hope."

Preserving this low defection rate has also factored into Goodman's thinking about London. The idea began as a favor for Kentridge, who wanted a London office; Goodman set out to find him one, and before long, she and Leslie Heyward were looking for exhibition space. "If there has to be a center in Europe, it's clearly London," Goodman says. Earlier, she'd mentioned that some of her artists hadn't been happy with their representation there. "I felt I should provide a showplace."

Some say Goodman represents the tail end of the more intimate galleries of the past, whose founders were moved more by aesthetic considerations than market opportunities. But Goodman, with her long, forward-thinking view, doesn't really seem part of an older generation. She does seem jaundiced by the market-happy, mega-gallery trend that's ascendant, just as she was with the gallery competitions of the 1980s. "The whole system is bad for the art world," she says. "These guys should pay a lot more attention to the quality of the artists that they're running after, and a lot less attention to grabbing everything in sight."

With many New York behemoths now operating branches in Mayfair, her new gallery is clearly also a defensive move designed to protect territory she's staked out over decades. Many of her competitors "are all so famous for trying to poach everyone in sight," Goodman says. "So it kills two birds with one stone." And while the building she found was "more than we'd wanted," she adds, "there comes a time when you just have to act."

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